OVERVIEW
Curbee is an on-demand car repair service. Rather than driving to a car wash, dealership, or auto body shop for small adjustments, with Curbee all you have to do is book an appointment on the website, and a Curbee van will arrive at your location with all of the parts and tools required for the job.
As a designer at Type/Code, it was my job to optimize the Curbee appointment booking flow.
CHALLENGE
Make it as easy as possible for a driver to book a Curbee appointment.
DESIGN
We could have designed Curbee as an e-commerce application– allowing drivers to add or remove as many car service items as they wanted to from a simple shopping cart, and then add appointment details like time and location in a checkout flow. But my design colleagues hypothesized that users would only book one, maybe two services at a time, and therefore felt a more ‘linear’, appointment booking funnel would convert better than a shopping cart. So we decided to make it more like booking a plane ticket on Expedia, or a house on Airbnb, and less like shopping on Amazon. We just needed to provide a decent solution for the perceived fringe case of booking multiple services in a single appointment.
In order to fully optimize the appointment booking experience we needed to consider all of the individual services Curbee provided. And while we didn’t need to spec out a flow for each and every service, it was helpful to map out booking flows for a few archetype services that adequately represented all of the possible data inputs that may be required for booking, as well as any dependencies that may exist if someone did book a combination of services.
Booking flow archetypes
For instance, Curbee didn’t necessarily have to collect vehicle information for users booking an on-demand car wash, but for services like an oil change, we did need to collect vehicle year, make and model, as well as product preference (e.g. premium or standard oil), since product options influenced pricing, and it was likely drivers would want to know how much their overall appointment would cost before booking. Since each service had its own custom, optimized booking flow, if a user did want to add a service that required more information than the first service they originally added, we had to find a way to elegantly prompt them for that information (as well as update their original appointment slot if the added service needed more time) without drastically changing the sequence of the existing multi-step booking wizard, and / or completely disorienting the user.
After designing a number of different options, here are the enhancements we made to the existing site to make it as easy as possible to book a Curbee appointment:
Landing Page
• Landing page featuring most frequently booked car services (based on market statistics)
• Location input fields displayed on the landing page to expedite the booking process
• Landing page featuring most frequently booked car services (based on market statistics)
• Location input fields displayed on the landing page to expedite the booking process
Service booking options on the landing page
Booking Sequence
• Standardized, but flexible booking sequence
• Add service functionality only available from the booking confirmation page; if clicked, would open a 'dynamic' add service screen within the current booking wizard, and update the navigation accordingly. This approach kept users in the booking flow rather than returning them to the landing page, and potentially disorienting them.
• Van icon in the header links back to the appointment booking confirmation screen so that users could always jump back to complete their booking from wherever they were on the site.
• Payment and vehicle data collected post-booking, but pre-appointment.
• Standardized, but flexible booking sequence
• Add service functionality only available from the booking confirmation page; if clicked, would open a 'dynamic' add service screen within the current booking wizard, and update the navigation accordingly. This approach kept users in the booking flow rather than returning them to the landing page, and potentially disorienting them.
• Van icon in the header links back to the appointment booking confirmation screen so that users could always jump back to complete their booking from wherever they were on the site.
• Payment and vehicle data collected post-booking, but pre-appointment.
Mobile mockups and flows
Final booking flow – pages and inputs
Add a service scenario with the 'in-wizard' service selector
Booking confirmation email -> pre-appointment prompts for vehicle and payment information
RESULTS
Delivered to the Curbee team as an MVP booking concept.